Control & Crisis in Colonial Kenya

Control & Crisis in Colonial Kenya

Author: Bruce Berman

Publisher: James Currey Publishers

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13: 9780852550694

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Professor Berman argues that the colonial state was shaped by the contradictions between maintaining effective political control with limited coercive force and ensuring the profitable articulation of metropolitan and settler capitalism with African societies. North America: Ohio U Press; Kenya: EAEP


Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 1900–1955

Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 1900–1955

Author: Katherine Luongo

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-09-26

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1139503456

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Focusing on colonial Kenya, this book shows how conflicts between state authorities and Africans over witchcraft-related crimes provided an important space in which the meanings of justice, law and order in the empire were debated. Katherine Luongo discusses the emergence of imperial networks of knowledge about witchcraft. She then demonstrates how colonial concerns about witchcraft produced an elaborate body of jurisprudence about capital crimes. The book analyzes the legal wrangling that produced the Witchcraft Ordinances in the 1910s, the birth of an anthro-administrative complex surrounding witchcraft in the 1920s, the hotly contested Wakamba Witch Trials of the 1930s, the explosive growth of legal opinion on witch-murder in the 1940s, and the unprecedented state-sponsored cleansings of witches and Mau Mau adherents during the 1950s. A work of anthropological history, this book develops an ethnography of Kamba witchcraft or uoi.


Primitive Normativity

Primitive Normativity

Author: Elizabeth W. Williams

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2023-12-08

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13: 1478027622

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Primitive Normativity Elizabeth W. Williams traces the genealogy of a distinct narrative about African sexuality that British colonial authorities in Kenya used to justify their control over indigenous populations. She identifies a discourse of “primitive normativity” that suggested that Africans were too close to nature to develop sexual neuroses and practices such as hysteria, homosexuality, and prostitution which supposedly were common among Europeans. Primitive normativity framed Kenyan African sexuality as less polluted than that of the more deviant populations of their colonizers. Williams shows that colonial officials and settlers used this narrative to further the goals of white supremacy by arguing that Africans’ sexuality was proof that Kenyan Africans must be protected from the forces of urbanization, Western-style education, and political participation, lest they be exposed to forms of civilized sexual deviance. Challenging the more familiar notion that Europeans universally viewed Africans as hypersexualized, Williams demonstrates how narratives of African sexual normativity rather than deviance reinforced ideas about the evolutionary backwardness of African peoples and their inability to govern themselves.


Identification and Citizenship in Africa

Identification and Citizenship in Africa

Author: Séverine Awenengo Dalberto

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-05-10

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 1000380084

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the context of a global biometric turn, this book investigates processes of legal identification in Africa ‘from below,’ asking what this means for the relationship between citizens and the state. Almost half of the population of the African continent is thought to lack a legal identity, and many states see biometric technology as a reliable and efficient solution to the problem. However, this book shows that biometrics, far from securing identities and avoiding fraud or political distrust, can even participate in reinforcing exclusion and polarizing debates on citizenship and national belonging. It highlights the social and political embedding of legal identities and the resilience of the documentary state. Drawing on empirical research conducted across 14 countries, the book documents the processes, practices, and meanings of legal identification in Africa from the 1950s right up to the biometric boom. Beyond the classic opposition between surveillance and recognition, it demonstrates how analysing the social uses of IDs and tools of identification can give a fresh account of the state at work, the practices of citizenship, and the role of bureaucracy in the writing of the self in African societies. This book will be of an important reference for students and scholars of African studies, politics, human security, and anthropology and the sociology of the state.


The Oxford Handbook of Kenyan Politics

The Oxford Handbook of Kenyan Politics

Author: Nic Cheeseman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-02-14

Total Pages: 766

ISBN-13: 0192547674

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Kenya is one of the most politically dynamic and influential countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Today, it is known in equal measure as a country that has experienced great highs and tragic lows. In the 1960s and 1970s, Kenya was seen as a ''success story" of development in the periphery, and also led the way in terms of democratic breakthroughs in 2010 when a new constitution devolved power and placed new constraints on the president. However, the country has also made international headlines for the kind of political instability that occurs when electoral violence is expressed along ethnic lines, such as during the "Kenya crisis" of 2007/08 when over 1,000 people lost their lives and almost 700,000 were displaced. The Oxford Handbook of Kenyan Politics explains these developments and many more, drawing together 50 specially commissioned chapters by leading researchers. The chapters they have contributed address a range of essential topics including the legacy of colonial rule, ethnicity, land politics, devolution, the constitution, elections, democracy, foreign aid, the informal economy, civil society, human rights, the International Criminal Court, the growing influence of China, economic policy, electoral violence, and the impact of mobile phone technology. In addition to covering some of the most important debates about Kenyan politics, the volume provides an insightful overview of Kenyan history from 1930 to the present day and features a set of chapters that review the impact of devolution on regional politics in every part of the country.


Struggle for Kenya

Struggle for Kenya

Author: Robert M. Maxon

Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 9780838634868

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book details the evolution of British policy toward Kenya from 1912 to 1923.


Industrialisation and the British Colonial State

Industrialisation and the British Colonial State

Author: Lawrence Butler

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1136307850

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Taking colonial policy towards West Africa as a case study, Butler shows that, during the 1940s, the Colonial Office evolved a policy of encouraging colonial industry as part of a broad programme of development intended to prepare colonies for independence.


A Tapestry of African Histories

A Tapestry of African Histories

Author: Nicholas K. Githuku

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-10-18

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 1793623945

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In A Tapestry of African Histories: With Longer Times and Wider Geopolitics, contributors demonstrate that African historians are neither comfortable nor content with studying continental or global geopolitical, social, and economic events across the superficial divide of time as if they were disparate or disconnected. Instead, the chapters within the volume reevaluate African history through a geopolitically transcendent lens that brings African countries into conversation with other pertinent histories both within and outside of the continent. The collection analyzes the pre- and post-colonial eras within African countries such as Kenya, Malawi, and Sudan, examining major historical figures and events, struggles for independence and stability, contemporary urban settlements, social and economic development, as well as constitutional, legal, and human rights issues that began in the colonial era and persist to this day.


Food and Famine in Colonial Kenya

Food and Famine in Colonial Kenya

Author: James Duminy

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-10-19

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 3031109643

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book offers a genealogical critique of how food scarcity was governed in colonial Kenya. With an approach informed by the ‘analysis of government’, the study accounts for the emergence and persistence of dominant approaches to promoting food security in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa – policies and practices that prioritize increased agricultural production as the principal means of achieving food security. Drawing on a range of archival sources, the book investigates how those tasked with governing colonial Kenya confronted food as a particular kind of problem. It emphasizes the ways in which that problem shifted in conjunction with the emergence and consolidation of the colonial state and economic relations in the territory. The book applies a novel conceptual approach to the historical study of African food systems and famine, and provides the first longitudinal and in-depth analysis of the dynamics of food scarcity and its government in Kenya.


Imperial Gallows

Imperial Gallows

Author: Stacey Hynd

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-11-02

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1350302651

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Not just a method of crime control or individual punishment in Britain's African territories, the death penalty was an integral aspect of colonial networks of power and violence. Imperial Gallows analyses capital trials from Kenya, Nyasaland and the Gold Coast to explore the social tensions that fueled murder among colonised populations, and how colonial legal cultures and landscapes of political authority shaped sentencing and mercy. It demonstrates how ideas of race, ethnicity, gender and 'civilization' could both spare and condemn Africans convicted of murder in colonial courts, and also how Africans could either appropriate or resist such colonial legal discourses in their trials and petitions. In this book, Stacey Hynd follows the whole process of capital punishment from the identification of a murder victim to trial and conviction, through the process of mercy and sentencing onto death row and execution. The scandals that erupted over the death penalty, from botched executions and moral panics over ritual murder, to the hanging of anti-colonial rebels for 'terrorist' and emergency offences, provide significant insights into the shifting moral and political economies of colonial violence. This monograph contextualises the death penalty within the wider penal systems and coercive networks of British colonial Africa to highlight the shifting targets of the imperial gallows against rebels, robbers or domestic murderers. Imperial Gallows demonstrates that while hangings were key elements of colonial iconography in British Africa, symbolically loaded events that demonstrated imperial power and authority, they also reveal the limits of that power.